*** This Week Through YOUR m4/3 2013.07.13 ***

Spent yesterday at the Kokopo show grounds with a bunch of youngsters from my village putting up my stall for the National Mask and Warwagira Festival due to begin on Wednesday.

I'm planning to take photos of all comers, but mostly the participant traditional singsing groups and sell them to whoever -- probably mostly the groups themselves.

All the stalls are built of bush materials. I’ll be camping out in mine with another bloke for the 6 nights of the festival f0r security's sake -- the stall is hardly lock-up and I'll have my lap top, printer, laminator, and and lots of "stuff" there. many other stallholders will be sleeping on site too.

I had the E-PL3 with the Panny 14 on the front, set to P and +0.5-1.0 EV to hopefully drag some detail out of the dark skins (and phooey to the highlights!). I needed fill flash for the roofing (2nd pic) shot.

The roofing, incidentally, is sago palm leaves bent over bamboo slat then held in lace by a long sliver of cane threaded through them. People make this to supplement their income and sell the sheets for about 3 kina (=$1.50).

Poverty stuff, right? Yes and no. Remember that the people around here are all subsistence farmers who can and do live well off their land and build their house from it too. Any money they earn is discretionary income.

So here is the frame going up, the roof going on, the and the "saw bench" (in fact, the timber for these temporary buildings is quite soft and nearly all the cuttings and trimming is done with the ubiquitous bush knife -- machete).